


soldiered together

by Anonymous



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (I think... for Dave anyway lmao), Angst, Canon Compliant, First Kiss, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mild Gore, Pining, Romance, Unhappy Ending, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 09:43:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17937416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "... I was foolish enough to follow him all the way to the front line."





	soldiered together

**Author's Note:**

> I rlly wanted to write from Dave's perspective

The kid had survived the whole tumult and battering and terror of a first week on the front, and he was still breathing and had all his fingers — Dave figured he was in good enough shape to formally introduce to everyone else.

He wasn’t, but that mostly went unnoticed, mostly because everyone else wasn’t in good enough shape to be around anyone  _ either,  _ but that didn’t stop any of them and wouldn’t, not until this fucking war  _ ended.   _ In a word, never.

Dave ended up having to be the calming presence in a room full of people that very much didn’t want to be calm, including the kid — well, the kid was the  _ reason  _ for most of the unrest, mostly because he kept asking stupid questions like “who the hell are we fighting, anyway” and “what year is it” and “where are we again” and everyone really just wanted to beat the shit out of him but couldn’t because he was another body they needed, another target for another bullet.

 Dave didn’t know why the hell he was protecting this one anyway, unless it was because of how scared he had looked on the ride to the front and the way his eyelashes framed his stupidly big brown eyes and the high-riding flush on his stupidly delicate cheekbones when he got upset, and the way his throat swelled when he swallowed and  _ fucking hell,  _ Dave, this was exactly what you went to Vietnam to get rid of!  

He was kind as an impulse, and the kid had latched onto him and not fucking gone away, and he didn’t  _ want  _ him to go away.  He wanted him to stay, and he wanted to look at him every day.

_ “Klaus  _ sounds Russian to me,” said Parker, and gestured with his water canteen at the kid’s head.  “You a fuckin’ Commie?”

“What, am I what?” said Klaus, and lifted his head up from his hands and stared incredulously at Parker.  “You  _ realize _  how stupid you sound?”

_ “Klaus _  is. . . German, right?” Dave interrupted, loudly.  “Or. . . Scandinavian.”

“I don’t. . .  _ know,  _ I, uh. . .”  Klaus tilted his head and bit at his lips, squeezing his eyes shut.  “I don’t know where I was, uh, born. I don’t know that.”

Parker  _ hmph _ _ - _ ed, and shuffled in his seat, eyeing the kid suspiciously.  “You look like a fuckin’ Com —

“Shut the  hell  up, Parker,” Dave said, and tossed Klaus a protein bar, because that was what you did with pretty people you weren’t supposed to be noticing, right?  You gave them food and defended them from idiots. Right. “We’re all  fightin ’ on the same side now, huh?”

“Right,” Klaus said, and bit off the end of the bar.  Muffled: “Which side is that again?”

   


Kid had the shakes, Dave noticed after a couple more days.  Wasn’t just the stress, or the fear; he had that too, but this was weird, this was fidgeting and scraping at his arms and fingers like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, and he stumbled away to throw up whatever was left in his stomach from whenever Dave managed to get him to  fuck in’  _ eat  _ what seemed like every half hour.  

And then he asked Dave for drugs, quiet, and it made sense.  His tangent about how he  _ knew  _ Dave could get him some because it was “the sixties” made less sense, but it was ok — he wouldn’t begrudge the kid his addiction, because he knew how hard addictions were.  And Klaus looked pitiful, dark circles under his eyes battling for dominance with the black of his lashes and paler than any soldier in this damn country would be for long.

Dave dared to put his hand out, grab Klaus’ shaking one in a mad dash of bravery, or maybe just complete and utter  _ stupidity  _ because who knew how the kid would take it, but he squeezed it anyway.  Tried to create a grounding point. He’d been a good Christian boy back home, hadn’t taken any of the Devil’s Lettuce or LSD or anything of that sort, but he’d known people who had, and he also knew floating without a way to connect to a place that made sense was hell.  

Klaus looked down at their clasped hands and back up, and he  shivered  and their eyes  _ met  _ and it was really,  _ really  _ hard on Dave, who was having a bit of a crisis inwardly that narrowed down to “pretty boy not for have” and was quickly losing precedence when it competed with the kid’s face.  

“Give me about a day,” Dave said.  “I’ll get you some marijuana.”  He couldn’t  _ not.   _ It was an easy job, and sure, he might get Article 15’d for it, but better him than the kid, right?  Kid could barely stand on his own after a week of walking.  Wasn’t fair to throw people like him in this damn war, anyway.  

Klaus smiled, shakily, and blinked and rubbed at his eyes with his free hand and whispered, “Okay.”

But the next night he cried in his sleep and Dave had to listen as he fought off whatever monsters assailed him at night, as if he didn’t face enough in the day.

   


They got trapped in a trench together, two weeks later, and it was not at all how it sounded, not an opportunity or a happy  occurence  or a way to ask the question that had been burning in Dave’s mind.  No, it was just hell, and just that; lucky too, or perhaps high water would have come for them and  _ that  _ would have been too much.

They lay huddled together at the bottom of a muddy collapsed trench, just a ditch in the ground with rotten slats wedged into the top and felt the ground around them shake with the ever-present force of grenades and the less-present sound of pounding feet.  Kid was smaller than Dave, and this was good; kid was smaller, and he was perfectly covered by Dave’s bulk as he wrapped his arms around him and pressed him into the dirt and prayed, prayed like he had never before, that if he was killed Klaus would have the good sense to play dead, too.  

Klaus didn’t have good sense, and he screamed once, before Dave got a hand over his mouth.  His eyes stared back into Dave’s and they were  _ terrified,  _ and Dave knew, in that one moment, that Klaus would never survive the war, not alone anyway.

“Please be quiet,” he begged, forcing the words through clenched teeth full of dirt.  “We can survive this. I’ll get you out of here. Just hold on to me — ”

And Klaus  _ did,  _ gripping the back of his shirt in hands that were too beautiful, too delicate to hold a gun or a grenade or a weapon of death, and never should have been forced to if it weren’t for wars created by men who sat in immaculate rooms and planned out battles like men’s lives were toys, not bright and desperate and wild things that fought to stay alive.

 Dave wanted to hold them in this pit, every single one of them, while bombs whistled above them and the threat of death hovered above their heads and the head of someone, if  _anyone,_ they cared for—but he couldn’t, and it was just them together in the trench clinging to each other and to life.  Him and Klaus, who Dave had decided was the  _one_ person who was going to fucking  _survive_ this.    


 They survived it, and then Klaus hung around him like a lost puppy every day after —  which  was both really nice and really, really hard on Dave, whose mantra of “do not touch” faded away after two days of Klaus and his fluttery, nervously physical affection rituals.  There was apparently no such thing as subtle with him, either. 

 They’d talked.  It was hard, but the truth was out there now and they both knew they were—well, the way they were, except Klaus was proud of it and Dave couldn’t even comprehend how to  _ start.   _ But Klaus knew, and it was both terrifying and so, so exciting.

So, of course, Dave invited Klaus to come to a bar with him.

Not “with him,” of course, because that would have been  _ highly  _ inappropriate and unbecoming of a soldier in the American army, but— with him.  If Klaus felt the same, well—well, who knew what Klaus felt.  But Dave, personally, felt that life in general deserved to get the middle finger from him for a while and just shut up while he took the most beautiful  man  he’d met in his life to a  fuck ing  _ bar.   _

Logically, Dave knew Klaus was just another rookie he hadn’t noticed the entrance of, but a part of him couldn’t forget the first time he’d  actually laid  eyes on the kid.  He’d woken up in a hail of blue lightning and, if he was being totally honest, had been prepared to die in case the explosion and flash of light was the last he’d see or hear before a missile sent him to whatever awaited him on the other side.  

But he hadn’t died.  No, instead he found himself staring into a pair of startlingly dark, gorgeous eyes— _ stop it— _ that looked just as shocked and confused as he felt.  Even now, even after convincing himself that Klaus was  really just  a recruit like everyone else here, something in him—something wistful—really wanted to pretend the kid  _ had  _ been sent down by some divine force in a blaze of lightning, just for him.  

But no, Klaus was Klaus, and Klaus was a person.  A person who liked the bar and the dancing and the music very  much, and  was currently being pulled every which way by excited Vietnamese ladies, which made Dave’s determination sink just a little bit, until he realized that he, himself was being pulled every which way too, and the women were intrigued by the dog tags and the white skin, little else.  

There were no other soldiers at the bar.  And after a few shots of some— _ fantastic  _ liquor, Dave’s misgivings faded away and he was ready to just enjoy his night, no matter where it would take him.

Of course, after Klaus ran into him on the dance floor, his “just enjoy your free day” dissolved and he was left with nothing but a wistful glance that Klaus  definitely missed  amongst his laughter and oh-so-casual homoerotic gestures that made Dave panic a little inside whenever he did them in front of other troops.  He put out his hand and gently guided Klaus’ back down to his side, stepping closer to do so, and then they were standing face to face under flashing golden lights with bodies passing behind and around them, their eyes meeting and speaking whatever their minds were too scared or stupid to say.  

“Hey,” Klaus said, tilting his head and smiling.  “ Wanna  see who can drink more shots?”

“Oh, trust me, I already  _ know, _ ” Dave threw back, and Klaus laughed and shoved him playfully towards the bartender.

It turned out, after an indistinct amount of time blurred by music and lights shimmering off golden liquid, that  _ Klaus  _ could drink more, which didn’t make any  sense  but  _ nothing  _ made sense after eleven shots of the bar’s crappy 40% alcohol.  Klaus, fresh off fifteen shots and still as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the day he was born, declared his victory by climbing atop the table and pouring the liquor from the bottle to his mouth until Dave yanked him down and carried him away.

“How’d  ya  do that,” he asked, and laughed as he felt his words stumbling out of his mouth.  “ Yer  skinny as a flagpole,  shoulda . . . been out by two shots . .  .”

“Fuck off,” Klaus said happily.  “I’m from fuckin twenty, um, twenty-nine. . . Dave.  Dave, I drink vodka every day of my  _ life.” _

“You’re on weed every day of your life,” Dave said, too loudly, and Klaus laughed again, his voice as bright and happy as a bell.  Dave had never wanted to kiss him more.   _ F _ _ uck,  _ where did that come from?!  

Well.  He always had, in some secret part of him,  want ed  to take Klaus somewhere that they could exist in an empty space, safe from outside forces and social consequences , and see if he really was what Dave’s everything wanted him to be.  The bar was their empty space, and all Dave had to do was take advantage of it.

“Hey.  Hey, look at me,” Klaus said.  When Dave looked, Klaus grinned brightly, as if he’d won a prize just by getting their eyes to  meet, and  burst into peals of laughter.

“Hey, calm down,” Dave commanded, barely managing to keep his own smile off his face.  God, he had never been so happy drunk before.  Or so confident.  For some reason, he could think of no repercussions to just grabbing Klaus right now and--

“I  _ can’t  _ calm down,” Klaus said, pitifully.  “I’m drunk as  _ fuck.”   _ His lips pouted outwards ridiculously.  Dave was possessed by some spirit of Being Brave, possibly brought on by the alcohol, and reached out to  tousel  his fingers in Klaus’ hair and caress the side of his head.  Klaus, impossibly, leaned into the touch and smiled.

“Fucker,” he said fondly.

Dave pressed a finger against his mouth.  “Watch your language.”

“Or what?”  Klaus’ eyes were bright as diamonds.  He laughed, the sound vibrating out over Dave’s fingers.  “What are  _ you  _ gonna  do?”

“I could beat your scrawny little ass,” Dave said fondly, and drew Klaus closer.

“Kinky,” Klaus breathed.

“Shut your mouth, punk.”

“Make me.”

Dave’s eyes widened, nearly at the same time Klaus’ did.  His hand traveled down, slowly, until it was resting against the bottom of the kid’s jaw, the knuckles brushing against the faint buzz of hair.

“You  gonna  do something about that?” Klaus asked, his eyes wide and— and hopeful, Dave realized. 

“Yeah, kid,” he said, his voice whittled down to a breathless whisper.

For once, there were no consequences hovering at the back of his mind, no constant reminder that he had to be careful.  Nothing but Klaus, and the sudden, feral need to take, to claim,  to — to make him his, if only for this one minute.

“Come here,” he said softly, and kissed him.  

Klaus made a little noise as their lips met, and leaned into him more, and Dave could barely think, barely hold on to this situation he was supposed to be in control of because Klaus was here, and his mouth was on Dave’s and he was sweet and soft and  _ beautiful,  _ beautiful in a way that made Dave’s terrors and self-doubt disappear in that one instant.  In that moment he knew that he would do anything to keep Klaus.  Damn the war, damn the world, everything.  

But the war got him, in the end.

The shell struck him full in the chest, and shattered ribs, he could feel it.  He didn’t have time for pain, the shock was too great, and he could feel his heart bulge— literally, with a terrible noise it seemed only he could hear— from the gap that had been blown into his body.  He slumped, shocked and breathless and not realizing, yet, that he would die.  That there was no coming back from this.

He fell, limp and helpless, against the mud and grime of the trench, the noises and screams and shots fading to soft ringing in his ears, and it began to hurt  _ now  _ but only because Klaus was rolling him over, shaking him, his face breaking to horrified tears.  Dave could only stare helplessly, like a fish out of water, gasping for breath he’d never draw again.

The worst part was that he could hear Klaus crying, he could hear Klaus  _ begging  _ him to wake up, don’t be dead, please,  _ please.   _ The pulsing of blood in his ears quickened, and the awful, wet pain in his chest deepened, and he knew he was dying.  But all of that lessened when he heard Klaus.

_ Don’t,  _ he wanted to say.   _ Don’t cry, please. _

He tried to move his hand and couldn’t.  He tried to move his  _ anything,  _ and was frozen, numbed and sedated by quickly approaching death.  God, let him touch Klaus one more time! Let him put his hands in Klaus’ hair again and feel him alive and warm underneath his fingers!  

But he was dying, and he  couldn‘ t move, and Klaus begged him and begged him to wake up and he failed him— failed Klaus, the only one he’d ever really loved— every time. 

As he slipped into numb nothingness with agonizing slowness—his lips going, then his ears and fingers, deceptively gentle, like falling asleep, except it wasn’t sleep, not this time-- he could only keep his eyes on Klaus.  He could barely see, but he had enough about him to want to rage against whatever decided to pull them apart, not when Klaus was crying and trying, trying, trying to make him stay alive.  He would die here, and Klaus would live on—and was that good enough?  Was that enough, to know that he was dying with his love still alive?

No.

It wasn’t.

He wanted to live, and he wanted Klaus to live, and he wanted—to get  _ away  _ from this war, even if it was too late.  It was dawning on him now, the idea of  _ too late.   _ He wouldn’t come back from this.  This was the end, and everything was over.  

He wasn’t scared.  But as Klaus clung to him and sobbed, he was horribly, horribly sad.  

_ I didn’t get to say goodbye,  _ he managed to realize.   _ I never got to tell him I loved him.   _ God, what he wouldn’t give for a chance to do it all over again--

He fell then, lulled to nothingness amongst a blaze of faintly familiar blue.


End file.
